Lawrence Durrell, 78, Author, Is Dead

Published: November 9, 1990

Lawrence Durrell, the British novelist and poet whose sensuous and exotic fiction, especially in the "Alexandria Quartet" novels, made him a sort of prophet of the sexual revolution of the 1960's, died Wednesday at his home in Sommieres, France. He was 78 years old.

The cause of death was not disclosed, but a family member said that Mr. Durrell, who suffered from emphysema, had been ailing for a week. Mr. Durrell's last book, "Caesar's Vast Ghost: A Portrait of Provence," a nonfiction book about the French region, was shipped to book stores only days ago by its American publisher, Arcade Publishing.

The four Alexandria novels, published between 1957 and 1960, tell a multi-layered tale set against the backdrop of one of Egypt's principal cities, in which Mr. Durrell (pronounced DURR-ul) lived in 1944 and 1945 while a press attache in the British Information Office.

The novels attracted many readers with the evocative quality of their prose, especially in the descriptions of Alexandria, as well as the diversity of their characters and their pervasive eroticism. The books are entitled "Justine," "Balthazar," "Mountolive" and "Clea."

Space-Time and Siblings

The relationship of the novels to one another was described by Mr. Durrell as that of siblings. He also said that the quartet was an attempt to apply the space-time continuum to the novel. The books were intended, he said, to be an investigation of modern love.

The particular quality of his descriptive gift can be seen in this passage from "Clea":

"The whole quarter lay drowsing in the umbrageous violet of approaching nightfall. A sky of palpitating velours which was cut into by the stark flare of a thousand electric light bulbs. It lay over Tatwig Street, that night, like a velvet rind. Only the lighted tips of the minarets rose above it on their slender invisible stalks -- appeared hanging suspended in the sky; trembling slightly with the haze as if about to expand their hoods like cobras. Drifting idly down those remembered streets once more I drank in (forever keepsakes of the Arab town) the smell of crushed chrysanthemums, ordure, scents, strawberries, human sweat and roasting pigeons."

Born in India

Lawrence George Durrell was born Feb. 27, 1912, in Jullundur, India, of English and Irish parents; his Irish-born father, an engineer, had gone to the subcontinent to work on the construction of the country's first railway.

The boy was educated in India and then at St. Edmund's School, Canterbury, in England. He failed to gain admission to Cambridge University, and held a number of brief jobs, including that of jazz pianist in a London nightclub. He published a few poems and, in 1935, a novel about life in Bloomsbury called "Pied Piper of Lovers." He was one of four children. His younger brother, Gerald, is a naturalist and author whose book "My Family and Other Animals" chronicled the eccentricities of the Durrells.

The same year Mr. Durrell married the first of his three wives, Nancy Myers, and moved with her, his mother and siblings to the island of Corfu, where he wrote his second novel, "Panic Spring," which was published in 1937. Because of the failure of his first novel, his publishers suggested that he use a pseudonym for his second effort; the name he chose was Charles Norden.

His first book of significance resulted from his contact with the works of Henry Miller and then, by correspondence, with Miller himself. This book, called "The Black Book, an Agon," was regarded as pornographic by standards of the time. It was turned down by English publishers and finally published in 1938 by the Obelisk Press in Paris, winning the praise of T. S. Eliot. When it was reissued in 1960, Mr. Durrell wrote that the book had a "special importance because in the writing of it I first heard the sound of my own voice."

Press Officer in War

Caught in Corfu at the outbreak of World War II, Mr. Durrell, his wife and infant daughter, Penelope Berengaria, escaped to Crete. Then he went on to Egypt, serving in Cairo and Alexandria as a British press officer throughout the war. He was also writing: "Prospero's Cell," about Corfu, and "Cities, Plains and People," a volume of poetry, were among the productions of those wartime years.

Mr. Durrell's love affair with the Mediterranean littoral was lifelong; he lived and worked in Rhodes and Cyprus for many years. What many regard as his best book of prose aside from the quartet, "Bitter Lemons," is about Cyprus.

As a press officer, he also served in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, for three years, a period that produced two satirical sketches of diplomatic life, "Esprit de Corps" and "Stiff Upper Lip." It was after leaving the Foreign Service in 1952 that he moved to Cyprus, where he lived with his second wife, Yvette Cohen, and their daughter, Sappho-Jane, until 1957, when they moved to Provence. Sappho-Jane died in 1985.

By the time he moved to France, he had finished what he described as his "first serious book since 'The Black Book,' much clearer and better organized," which was the first novel of the Alexandria quartet, "Justine." It was published in Britain and the United States in 1957. With the next two of the four books, "Balthazar" and "Mountolive," the novels are concerned with the same group of characters during the 1930's; but each sees them from a different point of view. "Clea," published in 1960 -- Mr. Durrell was a quick writer and often in need of money -- returned to the same set of characters during World War II.